Mail sending too heavy

mrgrammar

I have a site that has about 60 sponsors or so, who provided needed information for the visitors to my site. Visitors can submit information requests to my sponsors via a form on my web site. In the form processing, here is the progression:

Checks to make sure the email is valid
Checks to make sure that the required fields are filled.
Checks to make sure it is not a duplicate submission.
Writes the data to the database
Sends a copy of the email out to each sponsor.

Everything from steps 1-4 above happen instantly. The problem is when the mail has to go out. It is taking too long to send out individual emails to each sponsor. The page is timing out. Here's the way I have the code set.

$arRecipient = array();
$recct = 0;

$getemaillist = "SELECT addr FROM lists";
$getemailrec = mysql_db_query($dbname,$getemaillist);
while ($qryemails = mysql_fetch_array($getemailrec)){
	$arRecipient[$recct] = trim($qryemails[emailaddress]);
	$recct++;
}

foreach($arRecipient as $rec){
	mail($rec, $subject, $aemailbody, "From:".$sender."\nReply-To:".$sender."\n");
}

How can I get the mail to send out much more quickly so that the thank you page is returned immediately to the visitor?

aksival

It sounds like the sendmail server is lagging...probably because it's shared with other people using the same webhost (just a guess).

Are you using a webhost or are you running your own server?

Either way, you may be able to (depending upon your webhost / server config) send the messages into a database queue. This would happen instantaneously and the user would notice no lag at all.

Here's the catch: now you have to create a script that checks the queue every X minutes and sends the emails out automatically. You'll probably have to set this up as a cron job .

Not sure of anything else you can do, unless you contact your webhost/ISP.

Best,
aksival

mrgrammar

aksival wrote:
It sounds like the sendmail server is lagging...probably because it's shared with other people using the same webhost (just a guess).

Are you using a webhost or are you running your own server?

Either way, you may be able to (depending upon your webhost / server config) send the messages into a database queue. This would happen instantaneously and the user would notice no lag at all.

Here's the catch: now you have to create a script that checks the queue every X minutes and sends the emails out automatically. You'll probably have to set this up as a cron job .

Not sure of anything else you can do, unless you contact your webhost/ISP.

Best,
aksival

Thanks for the ideas. I have a managed dedicated server on which I have multiple web sites so that's probably where the lag is coming from. (There is a huge amount of spam that comes in. It drives me nuts.)

I used your idea and wrote the data to a database. Since I don'thave direct access to cron, I wrote a script that sends out the email.

One of the computers here in my office is just for automated applications. I wrote a small MS Access db running on that PC that opens and closes IE on a specific timer interval to the page with the email script. I have some other scripts that need to run automatically to do things on the server, so I set it up so that it cycles through a list of URLs.

It has worked out well. Thanks for the ideas.

Mr. Grammar